Bulls on the Investors Intelligence survey continued to climb while bears fell for the fifth week in a row. The bull-bear spread has now decisively cleared its August high as investors move to embrace the stock market rally.
Why It Matters: One of the missing ingredients for sustained stock market strength last year was the embrace of investors. To be fair, investors did not abandon equities from a positioning perspective and, in fact, during the record stretch of more bears than bulls on the AAII survey, equity ETFs have still seen nearly a quarter-trillion dollars of inflows. Nonetheless, rally attempts last year brought neither broad market strength (in the form of new highs > new lows) nor a meaningful expansion in optimism. In 2023, investors are seeing strength and believing that it can persist. That can become a self-fulfilling prophecy (at least for a while). Almost all of the net gains in the S&P 500 since 2015 have come with the bull-bear spread above 18.
Whoa baby. This might be a fun one. Or not. Either way, we'll likely find out pretty quickly.
Chinese stocks continue to offer up interesting opportunities. And today's trade is no exception. And to play it, we're going to do it in a fairly aggressive manner, but with a tight risk management stop.
Crypto markets can be daunting for those who come from traditional backgrounds.
There are entirely new market mechanisms, trading hours, different exchanges, and distinct ways to analyze the market, let alone the decentralized nature of how these markets operate.
It's no wonder that people find this asset class complicated.
Adding to the already heightened perplexity of these markets is how they're driven and how investors benchmark their performance.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
It's the weekly currency edition of What the FICC?
Yesterday, the US dollar index $DXY booked its largest three-day gain since it peaked in late September. So will today's bounce turn into tomorrow's rally?
I don't know. But you want to monitor these two levels for insight.
The macro factors are all bearish and the market factors are all bullish. It is true that after a bottom market conditions will tend to improve ahead of macro conditions. But it is also true (and we had ample evidence of this last year) that market conditions are subject to false starts. In those situations embracing unsustainable strength can penalize investors. This a trust but verify environment in which indicators of sustained trend have more weighting than one-off signals of opportunity. With the weight of the evidence balanced between risk and opportunity, this may be a time to move toward benchmark exposure, while focusing on areas of relative leadership and absolute strength.
Our Weight of the Evidence Dashboard fills in the details and includes a few charts that have our attention heading into February.